DSP Shrinks Bluetooth Phones

April 10, 2008

Untitled Document Cambridge Silicon Radio’s MusiCore chip combines its Kalimba DSP with a Bluetooth interface. It replaces a Bluetooth transceiver while offloading the host processor’s audio chores,...

William G. Wong

Cambridge Silicon Radio’s MusiCore chip combines its Kalimba DSP with a Bluetooth interface. It replaces a Bluetooth transceiver while offloading the host processor’s audio chores, improving performance while reducing power requirements. Also, it can directly access MP3 files in shared, external SD flash memory for music playback when the host processor is powered down to provide battery life on par with MP3 players (about 100/80 hours for wired/wireless audio). It can handle transcoding chores for this mode as well as PCM streams from the host, delivering Bluetooth or speaker-based stereo output with performance that’s better than most phones. The chip costs about $1 more than CSR’s Bluetooth-only solution. The development kit, priced under $2000, includes host drivers for MusiCore and shared SD memory access.
www.csr.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.